The Irish Coast

 

More loft clearing revealed a Liverpool Echo photo of our visit to Irish Coast (http://memoriamea.blogspot.com/2008/02/holt-school-societies.html). I can only recognise four people other than myself... I haven't seen two, Geoff Rowley and Ray Lever since leaving school. Geoff is on Friends Re-united which tells me he is married, living in Derbyshire and working for a Housing Association. I think Ray's motorbike was the first one I ever rode - he lived next to a useful little unmade cul-de-sac. One of the others was Jim Moore who was a close friend at one time and I have a photo of him in his back garden; which I'll not embarrass him by showing. He helped me destroy some of my model planes and things by fire so as to make realistic photos! He was last heard of living in West Kirby in the same road as my brother in the early 1970s and at the time was a Police sergeant.
The fourth, Iain Muir, not only followed me over to Leeds (sleeping on my floor for a night or two when flat hunting) but married Julie, a friend of mine who had worked at Childwall Library with me. Julie is one of my e-mail friends to this day even though she and Iain have deserted their native city and live in London.

Holt School societies

 

So far as I can recall I was in three school societies at one time or another – the chess club, the rambling club, and the transport society. This latter enabled us to visit places and means of transport which were otherwise not available to the public.


One of our trips was to see over the Coast Line ship “Irish Coast”. Irish Coast was launched in 1953 and sold in 1968 to Epirotiki Lines. She received the names Orpheus, Semiramis II and Achilleus in quick succession, before settling with Apollon XI. This was rendered as Apollon 11 in 1980. She was sold in 1981, and was lost in a typhoon in 1989.


I think it was the Captain of the Irish Coast who gave the society its life belt.


The rambling club took me to the Lake District a couple of times, including a trip up Jack’s Rake on Pavey Ark which is graded an easy rock climb and led to me joining the climbing club at Leeds. A perennial trip for the club was up Tryfan and the Glyders in Snowdonia and this photo was taken on one of those occasions.

On another occasion, on the same mountains in 1965, our party got split up in the mist and for a while we were missing my friend Keith Foddy and a couple of others. Fortunately Keith was never without his radio and he played it full blast to give the teachers a clue as to where they were. The tune, a top ten hit for Dusty Springfield at the time, "In the Middle of Nowhere".